Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge
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The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge houses the University's collections of local antiquities, together with archaeological and ethnographic artefacts from around the world.
[edit] History
Founded in 1884 as the University's Museum of General and Local Archaeology, the museum initial collections included local antiquities collected by the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and artefacts from Polynesia donated by Alfred Maudslay and Sir Arthur Gordon. Anatole von Hügel, the Museum's first Curator donated his own collection of artefacts from the South Pacific. More material was collected by the 1898 Cambridge anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait under Alfred Haddon and W. H. R. Rivers. Haddon and Rivers would encourage their Cambridge students — including Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, John Layard and Gregory Bateson — to continue to collect for the museum in their ethnographic fieldwork
Von Hügel set in motion a move to larger, specially built, premises: in 1913 the museum moved to its present location in Downing Street, although the new galleries were not fully installed until after World War I. Various depositions and donations of eighteenth-century collections — including material collected on James Cook's three expeditions — were made to the museum in the 1910s and 1920s.
Von Hügel's successors as curator have been Louis Colville Gray Clarke (from 1922 to 1937), Thomas Paterson (from 1937 to 1948), Geoffrey Bushnell (from 1948 to 1970), Peter Gathercole, David Phillipson, and the present Director, Nicholas Thomas.
[edit] External links
[edit] Further reading
- V. Ebin and D.A. Swallow, “The Proper Study of Mankind…”: great anthropological collections in Cambridge. University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1984
- A. Herle and J. Philp, Torres Strait Islanders: an exhibition marking the centenary of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait. University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1998.
- J. Tanner, From Pacific Shores: eighteenth-century ethnographic collections at Cambridge. University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1999.
